I come from Europe and back in the good old days, children would patiently wait the 2 magic occasions in a year to get a present: birthday and Christmas. Nowadays it has become ‘madness’. In fact the word: ‘insane’ is one of the adjectives used to describe these ‘crazy’ sales.
It is true, business is business, and the sole purpose is to increase sales, but the level of ‘aggression’ has become quite unbearable on consumers. We just left behind us the Thanksgiving week, a celebration that frankly should be only American and have nothing to do with anything East of New York and West of Los Angeles. But somehow we are flooded by “deals” wherever we are, all over the world.
Black Friday was a way to ease in the Christmas shopping season, to avoid the classic “I forgot to buy presents” which in the good old days made gifts even more special and meaningful.
Then, to get rid of some more leftover gadgets from Black Friday, Cyber Monday became a thing. Now they are “sold to us” in tandem, as Black Friday and Cyber Monday “insane” shopping week.
To push shopping even forward, a few years ago Alibaba introduced Single’s Day, on the 11th of November, or 11.11. And apparently it worked. During the last edition of Single’s Day, world’s sales recorded a whopping $30 billion in only 16.5 hours.
That is the amount of money that Estonia produces in 1 year. The first 1 billion of goods were sold in just 1 minute and 8 seconds. Surreal.
Before 11.11, another “important” celebration is 10.10, for no reason, as well as 12.12, on October 10 and December 12 respectively. Both clearly invented with the sole purpose of making a sale for the sake of selling more unnecessary items to distracted consumers.
The gamification of sales has reached new heights. Portals like Lazada have a “unique” Flash Sale 5 times a day. Needless to say that all items are pretty much the same in each “individual” instance. Different brands, similar prices.
This type of rush-to-buy brings up in consumers the idea that others are competing with them, hence the gaming aspect of it, where the frenzy brings users to ignore that part of the brain screaming: “You really don’t need this item!”.
Another interesting gamification strategy is to drop vouchers, starting the week before the actual sales celebration, such as 11.11 for example. Vouchers are collectible items, exactly as in video games, that users get for free — as goodies — and then become “forced” to spend because… hey they are about to expire.
This works on tricking consumers in thinking that because they have gotten the vouchers for free, they might as well use them. The catch is that the vouchers are carefully calculated to work on the unnecessary. For example, vendor A has 2 products. One is priced at $9.99 and the other at $4.99 .
Sum them up together and they make $14.98, however the voucher is applicable for shopping carts of $15 and above. Hence the consumer is “forced” to place one more item in the shopping cart, in order to claim the voucher valued $2.
So he or she will eventually add one more $4.99 item, thinking of someone to give it as a gift, and reach the total shopping cart value of $19.97. After applying the “well deserved” voucher worth $2, the shopping cart is not finally ready to checkout at $17.97, just one cent less than $3 from the previous $14.98 before applying the voucher.
Bottom line, the consumer has spent $3 more by saving $2. An absurd $1 extra spent unnecessarily. And for the reader that might be thinking: “Oh, $1 is nothing much…”, now imagine the same case with products priced $29.99 or $99.99, then multiply by all these voucher-guilt-buyers and the results will be in the tens of millions of dollars.
Lastly, gamifying shopping taps on human primary needs that are easy to read and satisfy. We may think that our brain is unbiasedly able to take truly independent decisions, but it turns out that we are much more prone to these commercial tricks than we might think. Especially when it comes to unnecessary goods.
I found myself awake at midnight of Black Friday, browsing flights to Japan, thinking that a holiday was all I needed. Then it suddenly hit me that I came back from a holiday in Korea just 2 days earlier.
Meanwhile, my shopping frenzy brain was already checking prices. It turned out to be cheaper than I expected… That got me thinking. When was the last time I checked the price for the same exact flight? Let me compare the price on Black Friday with the price on any other day of the year.
So I checked if my Japanese friend was awake. He was… guess doing what? Shopping online for a new phone… I asked him how much he pays to go back to Japan, since he goes regularly many times a year. The price he quoted was (not) surprisingly, pretty much the same as the “insane” Black Friday sale. I closed the website and went to sleep.
stefano@virgilli.com
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